Angelina Jolie did not make it to the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of Brad Pitt's Killing Them Softly. But as far as Pitt was concerned, his family was very much in the picture.
Just before Pitt entered the festival hall for the film, he snapped a shot of the scene — hundreds of fans and photographers focused on him. An electronic postcard for the Jolie-Pitt clan.
"I don't like being separated from my family. So you send photos back and forth," Pitt says. "That's the great thing about technology."
So to complete the postcard to Jolie and their children — Maddox, 10, Pax, 8, Zahara, 7, Shiloh, 5, and twins Knox and Vivienne, 3 — you could say, "Wish You Were Here. Dad rocked it in Cannes."
KillingThem Softly, which also stars Ray Liotta, James Gandolfini and Richard Jenkins, received a 10-minute standing ovation from the adoring French audience. That left director Andrew Dominik feeling a little awkward.
"It's so weird," Dominik says as he settles down at a table with Pitt to discuss the movie. "You handle it so well. It is not easy to have people focus on you. I stand there feeling like an idiot."
"Oh, no," Pitt responds. "I still feel like an idiot."
"But you hide it so well," Dominik says.
The two have developed a relationship since working together on 2007's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. While Pitt was filming 2011's Moneyball, Dominik sent him the crime novel Cogan's Trade. Then he pressed the issue via his own technology.
"I sent him a text saying: 'That book I sent you, I'm going to do it. Are you interested?' " Dominik says. "He wrote back, 'Yep.' It all took two text messages."
Says Pitt, "He just came over (to Pitt's home), laid out the story and we were done."
"And then we were doing our bit for the economy," Dominik says.
In Killing Them Softly, set during the economic turmoil of 2008, Pitt's Mob enforcer is sent to clean up after a robbery of a Mob-protected poker game causes a loss of faith in the underworld micro-economy. His bloody bailout gets the Mob economy back on track, but the brutal cleanup means that Goodfellas bad boy Liotta whimpers his way through a ferocious beating.
"I don't know how many times I've seen that scene, but it's just unsettling for me," Pitt says. "Even (at the premiere), it was pretty tough. Ray is used to giving the beating (in movies). That's what we'd expect from him."
Even with solid reviews at the festival for the Mob flick, Pitt's personal life often overshadowed the movie. Questions about his upcoming wedding to Jolie — the two became engaged in April — made some of the biggest headlines of the week.
Pitt handles the questions with grace, even if he doesn't enjoy them. But the attention can be good for a movie, especially an independent film like Killing Them Softly.
"It's good and bad," Pitt says. "You work around it."
For the record, Pitt said at a news conference that the couple have "actually, really, truly" not set a date for the wedding, despite rumors of a date in August.
But when they do start planning, you can bet that the kids will be back in the picture. "Yes, we'd like to make them a part of it, a big part of it. Beyond that, I don't know."
